For a few years now, I’ve wanted to share writer-director Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House with my son.
I’d been reluctant to do so because he’s deathly (perhaps irrationally) afraid of ghosts. Hides his face behind a pillow when a ghost comes onscreen scared. Nearly peed his pants during The Conjuring scared. Convinced there are ghosts in our house walking in the attic above his room at night scared (it was squirrels, but that’s another story for another time). You might think it’s odd for a 20 year old to have such fears, but you have to understand our family past.
Even if he doesn’t fully realize it, he holds this fear because, until 5 years old, he lived in a haunted house.
Until 2009, my wife and I lived in a yellow Colonial-style house built in 1983 that I bought in 2001 and moved into on September 11, 2001. The previous owner was a widower whose wife succumbed to a prolonged illness. I remember touring the house and seeing a make-shift wheelchair ramp leading to the back door. I don’t know how she died, but the man was always very generous and kind when I met him. He revisited the house a few times after selling it, telling me bits and pieces of their life together and sharing their legacy with the home. He also told me he’d buried a golden retriever in a corner of the backyard which seemed an odd thing at the time. I saw him recently working at a nearby Chick-Fil-A.
It was the first time I’d seen him since telling him this story.
After my then-girlfriend and I were engaged, her roommate decided to not renew their apartment lease, leaving my fiancée the option of renting the place on her own or finding somewhere else to live. Since we were engaged and in the heat of wedding planning, it just made sense for her to move in with me and (shock) live in sin. Flash-forward to our first few days together where everything we did was super (obnoxiously) cute. My wife frequently took her engagement ring off as she was unpacking boxes, rearranging furniture, and trying to make the space her own — something that was very important to her as she was moving into a space I’d built on my own.
One night, she stopped by the grocery store before coming home from work. I’d gotten home first, so I decided to sit at the foot of the stairs and wait for her to walk through the front door with engagement ring in hand. Proposing to her all over again, that kind of nauseating thing. Imagine the house in which Laurie Strode and Michael Myers had their final fight in the first Halloween. The front door opened directly into the stairs so that you could see the second floor from the foyer and vice versa.
Remember that. It’s important.
My wife walked through the front door, bags in hand, and I followed behind her like a lovesick puppy dog. It was cute at the time. Maybe. Anyway, I put the ring on her finger, and we went upstairs where she would put on slob clothes so we could eat dinner. Once she was ready, we rounded the corner from our main bedroom, turned on the light in the downstairs foyer so that we could see while walking downstairs, and immediately noticed the massive problem at the foot of the stairs.
Blood was pooling on the hardwood floor.
It wasn’t a few drops. It was a lot of blood, approximately three feet in diameter. Because we had cats, we immediately assumed one of them died, but they started walking in from other downstairs rooms, smelling and exploring the blood. We were both in shock. On closer inspection, there was nothing in the blood. No hair. No teeth. No fingernails animal or human. Nothing. Just blood. It even slightly spattered onto the lower sections of the nearby walls and the front door.
So, what do you do?
No, I really want to know what would you have done because those who know me well will tell you that I’m incredibly OCD. We had white carpet. Naturally, I lept over the blood toward the kitchen to obtain paper towels and immediately clean it up. We had white carpets! As we swiped at the mess, there was no doubt it was blood. I grew up on a farm, and on a farm, there will be blood.
To this day, we have no idea where it came from. We checked the cats for spots. I even took them to our vet who told me, “They would be dead if they bled as much as you say.” The front door was locked as was the back door. We weren’t later murdered by Michael Myers in our sleep, and no portals from “the other side” opened up to suck us in. There was just blood. We never experienced anything like it again, but a few years later, I would take a few random pictures around the house. One of them focused on our black cat and had those fuzzy orbs people often attribute to representations of ghosts. Another shows an orb moving across the frame, left to right. Here’s the picture (I’ve lost the one of the cat with the multiple orbs):
All of this to say, I do believe that my son spent the first three years of his life in a haunted house, and he emerged from it terrified of ghosts.
Now 20, I felt that it was time to share The Haunting of Hill House with him and revisit it myself, something I’d wanted to do for years around Halloween. This year marked the perfect time to do so as, due to the horrors of Hurricane Helene, his college closed for two weeks, and we were given extra time with him. So, we sat down together over the span of five nights and binged the series. He loved it. Yes, he was scared, but he was scared more by when Flanagan opts not to give you the big shock than when the shocks actually come. Once he realized that, he began to chill and settle into the mood of the piece. And he really loved it. In fact, he texted me a few days ago to tell me he was already rewatching it.
Feels good when you know you’ve raised them right.
For me, a second viewing of The Haunting of Hill House became a totally different experience. When I watched it through Netflix screeners back in 2018, I was obsessed with the “ghosts” in the background and all of the jump scares Flanagan packed into the series’ 10 episodes. Funny story: Episode 8, “Witness Marks,” elicited those outsized reactions that have since taken on a life of their own on YouTube. I remember there was a promotional video (that I cannot find now) Netflix used featuring “candid” reactions to The Big Jump Scare at the end of the episode where a ghost bursts forth from the back of a car while two characters are deep in an argument. But watching the episode for the first time, I had no idea it was coming.
So, when I tell you that I screamed, please understand that I “hollered.” For those outside of the South, that’s very, very loud. So loud, in fact, that my wife made me march upstairs in our new house to make sure I didn’t wake the kids. I did not.
But for this new viewing, most of the jump scares were absent for me. A few still got me. I’m only human. Instead, I was able to focus more on the mood of the piece, the performances, the production design, the writing, and the series’ take on generational trauma. Without the need to be scared by Hill House, I realized that this series I’d loved already was so much deeper and more thoughtful than I ever imagined. There are so many tender moments of delicacy and beauty packed into Flanagan’s scripts, and Episode 6, “Two Storms,” is still one of the very best hours of television I’ve ever seen.
The ending that once felt cheap and undeserving of what came before it now hit perfectly for me. That’s because, I suspect, that the rewatch really allowed me to focus on the growing madness and deep sadness erupting from Carla Gugino’s performance as Olivia Crain, the matriarch of the troubled Crain family that moves into Hill House with designs on flipping it. Her performance is sensual, motherly, disturbed, and deeply, deeply sad. I’d always considered Victoria Pedretti to be standout (and she is still great), but Gugino delivers on multiple levels. There’s a moment where she, as a ghost, wants to reconnect with a family member and pushes them off of a balcony to their death. Yet, as she does it, Gugino’s face isn’t filled with wraith-like rage. It’s filled with sadness and tears, hallmarks of a well of loneliness that will never be filled.
The Haunting of Hill House attracted audiences because of its scares, but that’s only partially what Mike Flanagan really wanted to do with the piece. It took me a second, pared-down viewing to fully realize this. It almost feels as if he wants to shock with emotion as much as he does with the sudden appearance of a ghost.
Maybe I’m getting older (I am), and maybe watching it with my son on an unexpected respite from college made me overly sentimental (It probably did), but The Haunting of Hill House is the rare limited series that engages the heart as much as it inspires abject terror. It’s a masterpiece of modern horror that hits you with a gut punch because Flanagan feels so deeply for these characters, so well acted by the entire cast.
As my son shared halfway through the series, “It’s not really about ghosts, is it? It’s about trauma.”
Yup. He’s right. Maybe I knew that back in 2018, but it didn’t really resonate until now with my son home, temporarily.
I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to revisit it with him…
…in a ghost-free house.
